Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to efficient caching of Huffman dictionaries in a computing environment.
Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Large amounts of data have to be processed daily and the current trend suggests that these amounts will continue being ever-increasing in the foreseeable future. Computers are very powerful tools for storing and providing access to vast amounts of information and are often time networked together. The computing networking industry uses compression to lower the network bandwidth requirements for growing portions of the internet traffic. Recently, the primary storage industry started using compression to lower the exponentially growing storage capacity requirements. Huffman encoding is a key part of standard compression algorithms. It has two versions, one for optimal quality (e.g., ratio) and the other for optimal performance (e.g., rate). However, a need exists for increased computing efficiency for caching of Huffman dictionaries.